"You're nuts, Parsons," Kettrich, the biologist, obliged.
Not many days later, Frank Terry and his son came to Port Laribee. Bringing a seven-year-old boy—a bright little guy named Will—to unlivable Mars, marked the elder Terry at once as a screwball.
Was the mother dead or divorced? Was Terry a remittance man, exiled by his family? He seemed to have enjoyed the good things.... Such curiosity was bad taste. Forget it.
"We like the sound of the place," Frank Terry explained. "We thought we'd take some photographs, really get friendly with the place...."
His listeners foresaw the withering of Terry's familiar enthusiasm, and his departure within a week. Except maybe Dayton guessed differently. The intellectual Terry was not much like Dave Kort. Yet perhaps a kinship showed in a certain expression, as if their natures had the same basis.
During the next Martian year, Dayton and the observatory crew saw the sporting-goods-store sheen vanish utterly from these two. They carried less and less equipment with each succeeding sally into the wilderness. Dried lichen, stuffed inside their air-tight garments, soon served them as additional insulation against cold.
From their lengthening jaunts they brought back the usual relics—golden ornaments, carvings, bits of apparatus that had not weathered away. And the usual photographs of blue-green thickets, war-melted cities, domes celled like honeycombs, suggesting a larval stage in the life-cycle of the ancients, and of country littered with shattered crystal—much Martian land had once been roofed with clear quartz, against the harshening climate.
Frank Terry became bearded and battered. Will ceased to be a talkative, sociable youngster. Still devoted to his father, he turned shy, sullen, and alert in a new way.
He had a pet like an eight-inch caterpillar, though it was not that at all. It was warm-blooded, golden-furred, intelligent. It had seven beady eyes. It crept over the boy's shoulders, and down inside his garments, chirping eerily. Except for his father it was the only companion the boy wanted.